CIA Stargate Collection

I'd be 100% behind calling the new 'space force' the Starfleet. There is no harm in making a name fun.

The pinnacles of this were probably the Buran and F-15 programs. US builds a Space Shuttle so the USSR needs one too... just in case the US decides to activate Shuttle's military features. Buran flies a couple times and is shelved as impractical. Net result: Billions on rubles not spent on other missiles/rocket programs. Conversely, the Americans convinced themselves that the Mig-25 was an epic superfighter. It wasn't. Billions were poured into F-15 development to counter a threat that didn't exist, billions that might have been spent on anything else. Net result: while the F-15 went on to be a great fighter, the USSR remained ahead in high-speed interceptors for two decades.

Governments probably want to fund all kinds of weird research in fear of missing out on the next atom bomb. But there was a long and rich history of rigorous science leading up the the development of the atom bomb. I imagine the same is true about the development of ICBMs ect.

That something is flawed does not mean it is useless.

You can find the fully unmoderated preprint forum at vixra.org and the results speak for themselves.

I know essentially nothing about this topic but from what I read due to this post the Soviets were not actually researching this, it was just a translation error.

[...] you would more or less have to also.

If your enemy wastes resources on something that is hopeless you don't counter by also wasting your resources on the same thing.

Its also philosophically suspicious to assume we understand everything about human consciousness today [...]

We may not have a good understanding of human consciousness but we have a pretty good understanding of fundamental physics and human consciousness can not sidestep the laws of physics.

Worse, the uber-skeptic position has been hurt in recent years, not the least of which with the military releasing incredible footage of the very same UFO experiences that have been dismissed by skeptics:

I don't know how such footage changed anything, there have been alleged alien space ship sightings for a long time, some easily explained, some remaining unexplained. What do a couple more examples change? There are no alien space ships roaming Earth's sky.

Also, small nitpick, but a witch hunt was a political move against women, not an honest attempt to find real witches. Societies with witch burnings were overly patriarchal and witch threats existed to keep women in line.

According to Wikipedia that was at best one motivation among several and neither a particularly early nor leading one. Anyway, I only used the term witches to make the comment more catchy, I did not want to imply that what they were looking for was the same or similar to witchcraft witches allegedly made use of.

Like virtually everything else in biology and learning theory the optimum is not at either "edge" of the parameter space but somewhere in between. Willingness to entertain model-breaking ideas and data is a compromise between the need to avoid falsehood and error and the need to learn and update models when needed.

The most annoying are the many who claim to be approaching thins with reason who immediately flee to the worst flaws in thinking there are, ad hominem and arguments from authority. Rather than focus on substantive issues, they point out that those putting forward the ideas don't have the right credentials or similar. Which, if you're just dealing with "am I personally going to accept this idea", that's fine. But it's a pragmatic dodge that is guaranteed to fail quite often. Identity of the speaker can't influence truth of what is spoken, it's that simple.

Then you've got things like the issues you mention, like the expense. So tackle the expense problem! WHY is it expensive? Things are only expensive for a few reasons. Either they require rare materials, extremely precise engineering, or they're being produced for an extremely small destination market. It's not magic. If the things can be made at scale, and they can be made with commodity components, they can be made cheap, end of story. That's just a matter of scale. Whether that scale could ever be achieved is one of those "you have to grant the hypothetical" situations. The slipperiness might be a bigger sticking point. What physical properties lead to stickiness and how do they affect light transmission through a medium? That might be the killer right there, but you have to actually pursue it before you can write something off.

Being intellectually adventurous isn't for everybody. Many people can't take an idea like "maybe it would be best if we ate people" and then just take it apart and determine what the consequences would be and whether they accomplish a desired goal. They just can't bring themselves to do it. Or once they hear about prion diseases, they bail instantly without looking for workarounds. You have to WANT an idea to work to ever have a chance of proving whether its possible. Then you can define the conditions under which it WOULD be possible. And if it's not possible, then you actually know why. Which means you probably know far more about the original problem you were trying to solve and that might generate some great ideas going forward.

Given the nature of the US government I think it is unreasonable to anthropomorphisize it as something that can "enjoy displaying a large sword," for example.

Do you really mean this? Are you saying that the government is incapable of keeping a certain fact secret, if exposing it will compromise national security?

We know through OSINT that the government has kept plenty of secrets and they have done so very very well for decades, before leakage or disclosure. Finally, with such a poor SnR these days due to information overload and psyops, even if the government isn't that great at secrets, you still have the herculean task of sorting through the information haystack looking for the needles.

I'm going to make a leap of faith, and say you're an adult in the US.

The fact that there are some US adults not aware of the massive scale secrecy, of the Manhattan Project, is genuinely embarrassing.

For a more recent example, see the NSA circa-Snowden.